The Spectator's Notes

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

In the days when Oxford and Cambridge had proper entrance exams of their own, candidates would stay on at their schools for a seventh term to sit them. This was the term in which educational standards were at their highest. Oxbridge then did away with the exams, in the mistaken belief that this would increase the number of applications from state schools. Today, growing numbers of pupils find that they are not ready to apply for universities in their fourth term of the sixth form (as is the prevailing custom), and so apply after their A levels. As a result, Oxbridge entrants come back to their schools once a week or so from September to December to prepare for their interview and for the small written exams that are now creeping back. As the Charity Commission demands that independent schools prove their worth through ‘public benefit’, might the answer not lie here? The schools could offer seventh-term coaching to pupils who have left state school. This would have the additional merit of confusing those admissions authorities who are trying to discriminate against private school pupils. They would get into terrible trouble if they were to bar, say, a clutch of Harrovians, only to find that they had been educated for 95 per cent of their time at comprehensives.

The Watford Gap is sometimes said to mark the change from north to south, but there are other ways of telling the difference. My wife, who contributes a nature column to our parish news, reveals in the next issue that all slugs north of Manchester are hermaphrodites. It is too cold for them to find sexual partners there, apparently, so they do it alone. Southern slugs, mating freely with others, are genetically stronger, but more at risk. They twine round one another, with the result that: ‘Sometimes, the genitalia of slugs become inextricably entangled in the process’. My wife then explains what happens next in words which may be all right for the parish news. I shall say only that it involves ‘apophallation’. After this, ‘the slug will be able to function sexually, but only as a female’. This account accurately mirrors what the British, north and south, think of each other.

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Anna

July 28th, 2008 5:42pm Report this comment

Let us hope that the delightful Hazel Blears didn't refer to you behind your back as a "fogeyish, bigoted and upper-class twit", as in her reference to Boris Johnson at last year's Labour conference.

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